How To Work With Influencers

Key Takeaways

sorry guys forgot to click record there um hey everyone my name is pj malenga i am the ceo and personal project um we spent the last two weeks delving into topics that we felt were important for entrepreneurs to know this topic was requested heavily by the survey we ran last month about how to work with influencers how to set an influencer strategy and how to have key things to support you and your business that you try to grow in today's conversation we've got both max and chloe who run businesses but also um kind of fall underneath the influencer category um i call them hybrids where they actually have the ability to kind of do stuff in commerce but they also understand the value of their platform i'm looking forward to getting both of them to share their story and give you guys pointers on what they've learned on their journey thus far topics and tips that they have when they think about influencer strategy for their business but also when brands approach them and furthermore i will be doing an overlay to wrap up um with tips and tricks that i've learned from having my own agency um without further ado i'm going to get max come up on the stage um and get him to kind of share his story and show his tips so max if you'd like to come up we'd love to have you on awesome i think just setting up the video all right then i think that's are we on yeah well on take it away awesome so hi everyone my name is max i'm 26 years old and i'm a social media influencer and entrepreneur i've only been in the influencer space probably about 12 months or so but i haven't learned quite a lot since being in the space i've had a passion for cooking since probably the age of three or even four years old and i really wanted to share that passion with other people so after losing my job and being made redundant in the first lockdown i decided to join tick tock with the goal to make healthy living easy enjoyable and sustainable for everyone and since starting tick tock i've gone from zero followers to 1.8 million followers in the space of just over 12 months and worked with a number of large brands such as gym shark gordon ramsay califia farms myprotein tiktok themselves and more recently the arnold sports festival now the purposeful project kindly asked me to join the panel today to share some tips and insights on how to work with influencers like me and business so i thought a good place to start would be to discuss what mistakes i often see when businesses approach influencers for campaigns now i often see a lot of mistakes but some of them are more common than others one of the most common things that i see is copy and pasted messages so i've literally had times where i've received messages from businesses and they haven't even bothered to change the name on the message so starting off a message saying hi jess when my name is max really isn't a good start business is contacting influencers when their products or services are completely irrelevant to the business's audience so obviously my audience is sort of food and healthy living based or healthy lifestyle based so approaching me if you're uh i don't know a sofa company would obviously be a waste of time and it's not really beneficial for the influencer or the business um another one would be either having no campaign brief put together or a really loose campaign brief put together so it just doesn't come across very professional and influencers who have a large audience will typically have like a a manager like i do who deals with the campaigns on their behalf so having an unprofessional brief that isn't put together well will likely cause you to miss out on opportunities um so they'll likely be less interested in what you have to say if you're not coming across in a professional manner another one would be not giving influence as creative freedom this is a big one for me and what i've experienced more recently so the influencer is the one that will know what content or videos will provide the most value for the audience and and what sort of style of videos work well for their own audience so not giving them the creative freedom can affect the returns for the company and obviously the results of the campaign and finally not doing your research into the influence of themselves before approaching them i think this is really important so doing your actual research on the influencer to see what their target audience is what their engagement engagement is like and what products or services would fit well within their niche influencers can have a really really large audience but their engagement on their posts might be quite low so that would be something to consider so yeah moving on i thought it'd also be useful to discuss some pros and cons of working with influencers there's plenty of pros so we'll start with those first so working with influencers can help you really reach a specific target audience so obviously mine is food and healthy lifestyle focus and there's a really specific niche that if your product fits within that then it's more than likely uh the results of the campaign will be effective or will be positive um the influencers also have more of a personal connection with the target audience as well you've probably seen like random facebook ads pop up on on your feed obviously there's normally a nice video or some nice content to go with that you don't really have like a personal connection there so i think it's really good that influencers have more of a personal connection with their audience this can also help with building trust within the brand as well if you've got um i don't know like a large celebrity or a large influencer that's endorsing your product or showing that they believe in the product this can really help in building trust for the brand especially helpful if you're a new startup and there isn't really much brand awareness there at the start um it's also quite cost-effective in some cases compared to other forms of marketing um good influencers will have an audience that trust them themselves and not only that compared to other forms of marketing or some forms of marketing you can get analytics on the post performance and return on investments through the use of trackable links and discount codes and another thing as well the final thing on the the pro side of things is the business and the marketing part department themselves don't actually have to spend the time or money creating the content as the influence is going to do all of this for you um so yeah that's pretty much it on the pro side of things moving on to the cons in some cases influencers or influencers audiences can feel like they're being sold to and this really can have a negative impact to the influencer in the brand so that would be something to consider working with the wrong influencer can obviously be harmful to the brand and the business um another really important one is following the ftc guidelines so there's certain guidelines that you need to follow as an example having um like add at the start of the caption when posting a video it's really important to follow these so when working with influencers make sure that you've got all of that in place um another con or some slightly negative thing that i found is doing short term one-off posts so i found just doing a one-off post doesn't really build much trust with the brand and their audience if say i'm an influencer and i just do one post about a random brand that i've never spoken about um and then and then that's it they never hear from me about that brand again then it's likely that's going to be quite ineffective and and finally it is same as most things it is quite high risk and there is no guarantee with it um but yeah i'd say that's it on on the pros and cons side of things but looking on or moving on and sort of wrapping things up i just wanted to share some tips on engaging with influencers and people like me in an influencer marketing campaign so the first one would be to do your research um the second one be to take time crafting a well thought out intro message to the influencer having a well-structured campaign brief and making sure that you stick to it i've had that recently where we've had a brief everything's all been agreed i filmed the video and then just before we're about to post it they completely changed their mind so this can end up costing the um the business more money and obviously wasting time as well um offering reasonable fees to the influencer to avoid time if you're approaching a large large influencer and you're a brand new startup it's it's going to be very unlikely that you're going to have a big budget to um to be able to pay them and it's basically going to end up wasting time if anything so maybe look to approach influencers that are within your budget range to avoid wasting time um long-term partnerships i found would more than likely be more effective than the one-off posts as i mentioned a minute ago so maybe doing a series of series of posts over the course of a month maybe one post a week for four weeks or more recently i've entered into like a six month contract with a business so that means that my followers are going to be see me regularly promoting the brand and i think that can really help in building trust with the brand and the business too picking the right influencer for your brand and your target audience is really important and i found getting a script written before anything's recorded so say i've got a campaign brief and i know what video i'm going to be filming if i was to write a script before i start filming anything can then send that over to the business they'll have a rough idea of what i'm looking to achieve and what the video is going to look like before i start filming so this can save you a bit of time in the meantime and lastly and for me the most important one is giving the influence of creative freedom i think that the campaign will be a lot more effective if you allow the creator to have some sort of creative freedom when creating the advert or the sponsored posts for your business and yeah that's pretty much it from me hopefully the insight was helpful um and if you've got any questions feel free to ask away thank you so much max that was super useful um you're like a can of knowledge and um congrats on the growth in the last year um so did you say you have 1.8 million across everything at the moment uh tick tock is 1.8 um and then i need i really do need to start focusing more on the youtube it's just really hard this is the issue when you've got like three uh two startup businesses i'm trying to do all the content is quite hard but i'm trying to put some different processes in place to allow me to put more time into the other platforms so i wouldn't say it's a small audience on the other platforms but in comparison to tick tock where i put like so much of my time it is so i think there's about 27k on instagram and six or seven thousand on on youtube yeah amazing amazing um well i'm excited to get um the content over to the people um in a minute and get more questions i can see there's a few people in the comments here who've asked a few things so um yeah looking forward to having you back on so um thanks max awesome no problem awesome right that was really good for max guys um i thought it would be good to kind of now go into a bit of the the business lessons before i bring up um chloe to give you guys the next section um i made a little presentation um that i would like to walk everyone through um and i'll talk about it from the kind of the business side i hope max dropped a lot of stuff i'm about to say and but hopefully there's a few more things there that we can kind of share for you guys um great cool so as mentioned bj ceo of the buffalo project um this topic's all about how to work with influencers in business um we mentioned in the event details that we wanted to get through a few things um one being how to develop an infinite strategy another one how to calculate your return of investment and sourcing about influences for your brand um i'm going to give you some case studies of small businesses doing some good stuff give you examples of what my agency has done in the past i sold in 2018 but the lessons still remain the same talk about resources um that will help you find influencers and then give you some insights into alternative inferences strategy so um just for context saying um a couple years ago about five years ago myself and a couple of youtubers came together and we set up our own influencer agency and built a directory that tracked over five million um influencers um we managed to win campaigns with coca-cola sony virgin records polydor and multiple agencies in the space of two years six-figure business 12 employees based in shoreditch we then sold in 2018 and some of the partners are still involved in the business until today there was a lot of lessons learned a lot of mistakes made um but the insights i hope will be helpful to some of you guys during this session um i suppose something that's kind of interesting to kind of like outline from the get-go especially for those of you that don't have a agency you can work with um i think a lot of small business owners should start thinking about their internal team especially their head of marketing if even if it's yourself um as a bit of an influencer director and move like an influencer director i think max gave a great point you don't want to just go to someone and say hey do this post for us and not have a brief so briefing is like the number one thing you can do um so the way we operated and i think you can actually take some of these notes and do it yourself in your business um we try to sit down and actually build out a scope of what exactly are we trying to achieve and put down the campaign ideas highlight the responsibilities so is there an editor that needs to provide something at a certain time when will the influencers need to send content and when is the kind of almost like do or die date that the campaign needs to be live by so let's say you have a product that needs to be out for black friday which is in about seven weeks from now um right now you're probably thinking right in the next week we need to get the creative going we need about two weeks of outreach so it takes you to like the second week of october we've then got one or two weeks for production and editing stuff if it's a big campaign for black friday obviously and then early in november you start moving to seeding you start going right this is these are the stuff that their ambassador's gonna post for us this is the one-off piece that we're gonna do for us and then these are the ways that we're gonna start tracking so you want to have links that people doing swipe ups on that are actually trackable by our bitly and other providers obviously that's an example of a bit more of a bigger campaign where you've got seven eight weeks but obviously this thing can be done with seven days with six months the the theory always remain the same you should you always want to allocate some time for scoping out what our key results are suppose the second stage of something that we've always done in my old businesses and let's do until today and my other businesses is have a bit of an influencer search it's no longer good enough to just go oh we're going to pick money may or we're going to pick whoever it is that comes to your phone first um it's very very important to go right who are the best the best people aligned to our brand utilize things like hashtags to find out who's ranking high in your field um have a look on tick tock tick tock is a great way to kind of give you insights that's what's going to pop on other platforms before they do um and then build yourself a lot a little searchless you don't need no fancy tools excel is fine um and you want to highlight probably in three sections one is the really big people um that are like your dream goal people second tier being people between 10k and 100k and then the next bit being micro obviously this is relative to different businesses but again it's an approach i highly recommend um even if you're not talking or having to pitch someone else internally as a team you should be building campaign presentations um you can probably skip campaign sign off if you're working on it internally yourself but have a sign off date as to when you're going to kind of select your you know a set of people that you're going to go to first and then you'll be set people next um you don't want to move into what we call campaign operations so it's no longer good enough to just reach out to influencers and wait for them to kind of do it as and when they please you want to kind of have your negotiated prices in place have a contract for them you can download some really awesome tools on the internet now and contact lawyers edit it up and obviously reach out to me if you don't have the capacity you know i'll send you some examples you can use but it's very very important to really agree what people are going to deliver and when because the influencer agency for many years wasn't regulated and unless you're going for a big agency oftentimes small businesses can find that they pay a deposit and the content doesn't come out or the influencer gets a deposit and they don't get everything from the client so having some sort of contracting or some sort of agreement locked in is super super important and the fifth bit is content creation so having deadlines and times when the content is going to come back so you can give appropriate feedback it's super important um and i i alluded to this earlier but posting and tracking is just as important so how you track your reach your personal engagement and stuff that are important for your campaign not every not every campaign is about reach some some campaigns about clicks um so really figuring out what's going to be important for you and your audience is next on the list um just to kind of broaden out everyone's opinion i know everyone kind of always thinks of influence i think so either one or two things youtube want to think of instagram um something that the team and i developed um quite early was kind of figuring out how to kind of like have a macro campaign with a campaign so oftentimes small businesses we don't have the abundance of apple or nike budget but there's still some smart things you can do to test your creative before it goes out and becomes massive and you don't know what you're gonna get um so yeah on this on an instagram seating level um we i've always said something about um kind of seed optimization so what you want to do here is create a couple of creatives with one or two people not your whole set of influences and get them to test out different creative stories you want to tell before you go live with your wider campaign it's nothing that's rocket science but you'd be surprised the amount of businesses that don't do it they spend months or weeks planning this big marketing plan and then they just pump it all in the market and then they don't have no way of knowing whether it's going to work or not and once you get into the kind of process of having influences you work with on a regular basis i highly recommend a b testing just like you would on on facebook ads just like you would on google seo but a b testing with your creators and finding one or two people who have an interesting audience size pool that you can test from by getting them to run some polls getting them to run different things in the weeks leading up before you go live with the big campaign what does this give you it gives you the ability to engage passion points it gives you the ability to collaborate with some micro influencers before the beta campaign and it gives you the the ability to optimize and also show examples of what the standard is so when you're working with other influencers you can show them the standard and give them a creative license to go out and do what they need to do the next place is youtube collaboration youtube collaborations have existed for many many years um there's obviously on one point where you can kind of like jump on challenges and kind of implement your product through that then you guys can create your own kind of pieces of content which we'll probably call more goals where you collaborate with people and kind of tell a story over a period of time um and then there's obviously the pranking side of things that lives on youtube and there's loads of other places that you can live but i suppose there's challenges you can hop on already where you can work on the craters you already react to challenges like your product place within it or your service place within it and then i the next one i really recommend is is the storytelling element so how do you work with people who tell more long-form stories because then you get upside of them being collaborators um i suppose a couple of points here that are super important to remember um you want to shortlist your ideas so engage one or two influencers as consultants because oftentimes a small business owners have so much going on and you'll be surprised what you could do if you actually asked one influencer not to come in and just post but can we pay you 200 pound a day or a fee to come and spend um some time giving us insights on what's trending um because you'll find the whole reason that these influencers are actually influencers because they have great base knowledge on all the platforms that they exist on and especially the ones that they're most likely on so for example max you'll be a great person to pull in for one or two hour conversation just on what's happening on tick tock in the last two three weeks um and that will enable you to co-create with the influencer other influencers that you can work with and then get direct traffic when you're trying to put stuff out and the benefits of this is that it's mutually beneficial you're getting influencer involved much more earlier sometimes when people come out of a brief it's like very rigid and it's not always to what the influence wants to do but you're engaging with an influencer more as a consultant prior is a recommended approach that i've used many many times with different clients um the next one obviously the localized um influencer marketing is something that is very important not just to me but to a lot of small businesses what you can do is start looking on instagram and tick tock and searching your location and finding the top post there and even without having to use big tools you can really find very quickly um very very simple um an interesting kind of people that actually kind of index really high in your area so for example we ran a search in liverpool um a couple months ago and this influencer came up as a localized macro influencer that we can go and do something with um you'll be surprised the amount of brands i just don't even do the basics of like going outside london or going outside paris or going outside new york i think there's abilities for small businesses to actually win with small local creators and actually get some targeted insight and targeted growth in your area you're looking for um again the interesting thing with kind of having a venue engagement approach to influencer marketing is that you find influences in the city that you're working with you get a chance to filter influencer styles and then you get a chance to do some vip product testing or seating because they can actually come into a store or come into a street or do something local for you guys and it just makes for more seamless posting experience because you both get the local nuances in the area you're in so for anyone that's tuning in who's not london or from a major city um don't ever fear nothing influence martians for you not for you is still something that you can do very localized to yourself um there's a really good brand called um planted that i wanted to walk us all through and i think we can all take some lessons from this is a brand that started in the pandemic um they literally every couple of weeks always kind of change up their feed um the lady who started this made 100k in the first five months after being a and has now made seven figures um and the key things to learn from this brand is it's really about storytelling um so they use very very creative um and simple ways to kind of just [Music] so founders here telling stories but she's got different um users of the product to submit um their own content of them utilizing their product um i i think this is something that's good we're going to see more and more of for small businesses um doing product reviews is something that's really massive if you're if you're not wanting to kind of pay big fees with influencers but getting them to actually use your product and see results is that it's a massive thing um something that she's also been doing is getting the tagged up even though the posts are low but the tags have been going up and getting herself featured on different um massive pages so i'll give you guys an example shortly um so hackney's finest is a page that has over 400k followers um natural hair lovers his page has half a million followers this has a thousand likes and it sends people to her page and just tells the story of what she's done but you can think about in your niche as well um like aside to your influencer strategy who are the bigger pages that represent your industry and how can you guys get featured some of these posts when it comes to working these pages can actually sometimes be at a similar rate or sometimes lower we're working with a massive influencer so i would recommend having this in your kind of strategy for 2021 moving forward um and yeah the results uh planted started in june 2020 they've now got 43 000 followers it's um a brand that's gone on and done seven figures um and that's something that i think everyone could be inspired by um great so yeah that was my little bit of insight that i thought was recommended for everyone i'm just going to stop sharing my screen um if you guys have any questions from the gems i've mentioned there please put in the questions i'm now going to bring up chloe taylor um chloe if you don't mind coming up hello hey perry um so for the audience um do you want to give us a bit of context about you your story and transition from you know becoming an influencer to an entrepreneur and some lessons you've learnt so far yeah yeah sure so hi i'm chloe and i am the founder of earthaya.com which is an online vegan marketplace for fashion and beauty and so that's kind of like my day job that's the business that i own but alongside that i also have a social platform now and i've kind of built up over several years and so i've got a small following on instagram and then about 40 000 followers on tick tock um so nowhere near max is but um yeah we've still got a small platform to work with there which is quite nice and that really came about for me when i moved to california and i just wanted to document like what i was doing over there really um and i think because i'd lived in the uk beforehand people were like oh wow this is actually so different um and so my following started to grow from there and to be honest my niche has changed a lot over the years so i think you know if you are trying to build a niche yourself um don't worry if you're not sure what you want to do with it yet because you can change that over time um so that's what i did and now i post about vegan fashion and beauty pretty much across all channels so that's me i love that and um what's been the change for you when it's com when it comes to kind of being a macro influencer as i know you said numbers are small but as i proved with the planet thing you don't need a mill would be making money in this space um and you are collaborating with brands you're being invited to talks even at seventeen thousand program and forty thousand tick top yeah i think to be honest it's all about the value that you give people i think those are typically the type of accounts that have the better engagement level um and just building that kind of community there so it doesn't really matter about the following that you have i don't think i think it's more about the impact that you can have and the brands that i've worked with whenever they do reach out to me that's one thing that they always bring up with me is the fact that you know i have an engaged community on there and so i've worked with brands like clearco who's be called cleobank women's best tlf apparel recently sigma beauty and bold face lashes so there's quite a range of brands that i've worked with but um yeah i'll i'll touch more on that a little bit later but i think for me from a brand point of view it is so nice when the they kind of like schmooze you a little bit and they're like actually have done their research and go do you know what like this thing that you did we absolutely loved and the engagement you got on this was brilliant and we think there could be a really good synergy with us with us collaborating together and so yeah love that um so what would you say out of presence on the working influences in europe again not too many i i think yeah because i can see it from both sides there's there's a lot so as a small business now so with with my brand we're just bringing out our own clothing line next week so we're kind of going through the whole process of reaching out to influencers too um and i think there's so many different ways you can go about it but i think as a small business just be very careful um because you need to make sure that you're working with the right influencers to get a positive roi because you can very quickly look at someone's profile oh they've got thousands of followers they'll be brilliant and then it comes down to it and they get like two comments in there in their comment section and it doesn't do very well at all so i think for any of the brands that are looking to collaborate with influencers first of all look at your niche and look at an influencers content that they already put out and think okay is my products product sorry going to be in line with their native content that they already put out out there because if people are engaging with that type of content then the likelihood is they'll also engage with that content that the influencer produces with your product um so i think that's really important and then also looking at like i said earlier their engagement rate and the kind of community that they've got like they might not have like thousands of thousands of followers like i know girls myself that i'm friends with that have like 10k followers i think on instagram and get over 3 000 likes on photos and we'll get hundreds of comments because they've built up that community and you've got to look at those comments i think as they're almost like hot leads for you really they're the types of people that are so invested in that influencer that should they say oh this product is amazing they're going to be the types of people to buy from right so i think that's really important and finding the right influence there is key um and i think as well now influencers are demanding a hell of a lot more um i think people are getting tired of consistently getting asked to do collabs for like a gifted piece of content because these people now are even with like i said like something like 10k followers people are able to take that as a full-time job now um because people can get paid from that if they've got the kind of engagement levels there and so yeah i think influencers are asking for a lot more because you've got to think about it they've still got to pay rent to um you know they're looking at hair makeup lighting camera equipment and then the time that they're taking to film the content and the idea generation as well behind that content if they've got the creative freedom to do so um so i think as a brand reaching out don't straight away be closed off necessarily to just being a gifted collab because nine times out of ten i feel like influencers would get offended by that and you'd end up actually having a negative relationship with them i think introduce yourself give a little bit of background about your brand and you know like i said schmooze the influencer and be authentic don't just be like hey we love your content be like very specific be like oh we saw this campaign you did with this brand and we absolutely loved it um and we think you would be brilliant with us because of xyz um and then i think they'd be more open to them potentially doing a gifted collab with you if you didn't have the budget necessarily to do a paid campaign um but if you do have budget behind you then obviously just ask for the influencers rate i would say um but yeah i've had a couple of people try and dm us to do collaborations with us being like hey oh my god we love your brand so much yet they don't even follow us on any social so i think from an influencer point of view too definitely make sure that if you're trying to collaborate with a brand that you are already following them because there's just no way that you'll get a collaboration out of that um if you're not really um see i think that's it from the brand point of view and also from an influencer point of view there is a really good um instagram page called influencer pay gap um and i think on there it's really good to kind of just have a little brow so what they post on there is about kind of like horror stories really of influences that have got a specific type of following and it it shows you their amount of following too and their engagement rate and what brands have kind of offered to pay them so you can kind of look at people who have got a similar following to you and be like okay that's how much they're getting paid and their engagement rates this similar to mine that this is how much i should be charging um as an influencer and i think as a brand as well it's really good to look at because you can look at all of the brands that are being called out for being crap really um for offering not enough or the way they're collaborating and how they're reaching out to people and so you can kind of get a really good gist from that page as to how best to go about it and again from another brandon influencer kind of point of view there's a really good platform called hashtag paid um and i'm a part of that as an influencer but essentially you put in all of your um following and details and stuff like that and connect your social accounts and brands can find you there and then be like okay you know you're posting content in our niche and then you kind of have to pick yourself to the brand as to why it would be a good fit and then they can either approve or deny um so yeah i i think that's there's a lot of pros and cons but i think making sure that you're being authentic um and making sure that you're doing the research to find the best influencer for you and vice versa really um even if you're in an influencer kind of position make sure that you do your research on the brand and whenever you're reaching out on on um usually through email i would say is probably the best way um i know for me i don't really check my dms that much so it's it's a nightmare to find any like collaborations that way but if you want to get in touch do it through email and always make sure whether it's to a brand or whether it's to an influencer that you're letting them know the value that you can be adding by collaborating absolutely i love those gems love those gems chloe um i'm just going to bring up max um up to the the main stage again um and then we'll start answering some people's questions all right then great um so we've had a few questions in um and this is open to both of you to answer um so jessica allen wants to know how do you know how much to offer an influence are or should you let them set prices who's um answering these i can offer a little bit of insight if you'd like so um i think it will be different for every influencer and they're all going to set more than likely their different rates but one way before i had like a manager um sort of doing that sort of thing for me is there's a website which i cannot remember the name but if you just go to google and type in um like how much to pay a tick tock influencer or instagram influencer and just add their um like their hand or their instagram name or tick tock name into this calculator it'll give you a rough idea of the type of fee that you can expect to pay or that they're expecting to charge now it's not going to be accurate but it can give you a rough sort of idea before you even reach out to them in the first place um like i said it's really hard because there could be someone with 10 000 followers and they've set their rate to like a thousand pounds per post and there could be someone with 500 000 followers and they've got a rate of 500 pounds per per post so it could be completely different but i think a simple sort of uh calculate uh calculator like that can give you a rough idea um before reaching out i wouldn't necessarily let them set the prices it depends what your budget is really i would say set whatever your budget is and then try and find influences that would do the post within your budget if the campaign goes well then obviously that will hopefully increase your budget for the next time you can move on to some larger influences i was just going to tap onto that i think the one i typically use is the influencer marketing hub because it gives you their engagement rate as well so you can kind of get a more accurate um kind of like idea of what to charge for that engagement rate rather than just following um which is quite good and then um the page that i mentioned previously as well the influencer pay gap on instagram that's really good as well to see what type of rates people have for their specific following and engagement rate too and so i think yeah just doing your research and looking at all those different kind of um sources first before you even think to reach out is is the best thing to do really i love that um i've actually put in a chat for everyone the influence of martial calculator and two others i found from google search so um yeah anyone can just jump in and have a look at that what they've shared um the next question is from anonymous attendee how as an influencer will you set your rates and will your rates depend on the brand in contact or one rate for everyone um i think for me it really depends on what they're asking because every brand is not going to ask the same deliverables from you and what i kind of like to do is kind of have like a for myself anyway just a price list for how much i would charge for a tick tock video of x amount of length so whether it's a 30 second video a 60 second video a three minute video um and kind of like the same with instagram and reels if it's going to be a 30 second reel like how much would i charge for that um and then an in feed kind of post with instagram how much do i charge for that how much do i charge for story views um and kind of have that price list with yourself anyway and then when a brand comes to you and they're like okay chloe we want five um tick tocks and an in-feed post what are your rates you can then just mentally go okay well this is how much to charge for this this this and this this is what i'm gonna go in with um and i think as an as an influence as well i would usually highball it first and go in with a higher cost because typically you'll find that the brands will try and negotiate that down a little bit um so i think that's the way i would go about it personally max any thoughts um to be honest i would say pretty much everything that chloe said that's why i didn't jump in there i'd say yes pretty much with regards to the rates it depends like i say on what your following is what your engagement's like and i think having worked with like previous brands and stuff before you can not necessarily use them as case studies but say if i'd not worked with any brands before but had good following good engagement um i would like to be able to charge a better fee if i had work with like the likes of gymshark and other large brands as well because hopefully they would have gone well and that will build a little bit more trust with the brand that's reaching out to you um so yeah um yeah i'm not really sure what else to add there i think that's pretty much pretty much it so we've got a question from sam he says um what gets the best roi in terms of types of posts looking to maximize their bang for bucks as a small business with a tight budget also guys just a quick one just to say that um if you guys can keep the comments clean we've just removed john for the whatsapp and email thing that you just put up so you guys can ignore it um otherwise i would like yeah remove it but yeah the question guys is what gets the best roi in terms of types of posts i think at the moment it's got to be reals and tick tocks because of the organic reach that you can get off of that um you know and influencers in feed post could be amazing um but i think the added benefit you've got with tick tocks and reels at the moment is it could still do amazing and then also be pushed out to thousands more people so you're getting so much more bang for your book there really and i think another thing would be trying to make um well first of all giving the the creator the creative freedom because i feel like they're going to know their audience they're going to know what sort of posts their audience were expecting and what would work well so if you give them the creative freedom then they're more than likely gonna come up with a better post that fits well and resonates well with their audience and hopefully it doesn't come across as an ad so i've had really strict like campaign briefs before and they come across like a proper salesy ad sort of post and that's just not going to do well the audience will switch off straight away they know it's an advert same as when you see an ad on tv you just switch it over if the influencer can sort of match that ad or the campaign with their uh current sort of posts and i think that'll more than likely work out well and if it's a little bit more subtle rather than a hard sell then you'll probably get better results and the posts actual performance would probably do better as well yeah just just to add on to that max and from speaking with tiktok as well that's exactly what they say that you should be doing as a brand is really trying to make sure that any ads that you do put out there with influencers or whether whether you're promoting it from your own kind of like um profile yourself anyway that it should really be native content that people would just think is a part of their feed already and just to make sure that you're getting that view time and retention right there too oh i love that thanks guys um olivia's asked are there any example campaign briefs we can access i suppose in my my first answer is everything is kind of bespoke and sometimes it's nba bright but um if there's any any examples you guys can think of that you can find on the internet or that you can point them to be great if if you um if you take a look at that platform called paid um they've actually got a dashboard on there of campaigns that are currently rolling out from big brands on there and it's got the brief on there um so you can have a little look at that and kind of like adapt it to you really and and if you want to join the platform as a brand i think you can um but equally you could just take what they kind of do on there and have it as inspo and then kind of like draft your own kind of brief through email or dm however you want to do it like that i love that um where can people um find you both away from this oh i've got another question well someone's asked um if they can get back to lawyers um but yeah i think we'll tackle that outside outside of this okay cool um i think now i think that's it if anyone's got any last questions before we wrap um please share it i'm trying to go through all the questions that we've seen but i think we've tackled everything thus far um is there anything that i review wish to still share i don't think so yeah let me have i'll have a thing i'm trying to think what we've not tapped on yeah we've platform we've tackled obviously searching we've got engagement rates we've got stories this has been quite a lot um i think one thing that i will say is um influencers typically from from what i've seen anyway will have multiple collaborations on the go and with all very different deadlines to them so i think as a brand like you need to kind of plan ahead and give them at least one to two weeks i think to really like get that content done and submitted um just because they'll probably have so many other things going on and you don't really want to be disappointed in going in last minute and being like oh by the way we need this in the next two to three days kind of thing like be realistic with it um and i think another thing that's worked well for me personally as well is by setting a deadline but for review so if they submit it then and you can review it and be like okay this is exactly what we were asking for actually there's a bit in there where your voice is kind of like mumbly and you can't hear it can you like refilm this or the audio on this or something so you're kind of collaborating with them in that sense and still giving them creative freedom of course but just making sure that both parties are happy and then any changes that can be made then can be made and resubmitted love that um so yeah i've got a couple new questions i've come in um we've got as a small business what engagement rate is the lowest to look at um i don't think there is like a specific like you should aim to have like at least 10 comments on every post but i suppose it would be relative to whatever their audience are um i think it would be more to look out for the things that sort of not necessarily red flags but say if you're looking at an influencer that's got a large audience and they're getting literally like one or two comments on their posts then that would be something to look out for um and if likewise they've got a small audience but you're seeing hundreds of comments on the post and obviously that would be a positive sign on the engagement side of things but i don't necessarily think there's a minimum or maximum sort of like threshold it would be quite unique to whatever that influences audience sizes i agree bear it bear in mind as well that the bigger someone's following is typically the lower the engagement rate goes so it's not necessarily just kind of like a measurement for how good or bad their kind of community is because like kim kardashian i think she has like less than 10 engagement but she's got huge reach um so it's all kind of yeah you just need to look at it as a whole really and think okay what kind of effect will this have for me as a brand um there are tools out there actually though where you can check if people have fake followers or not um oh gosh what can't think of them off the top of my head but i think even like from social channels or something like that you can have a little look online and it will tell you how many of their followers are real or fake and you can kind of gauge from there what their true engagement is as to and i think another thing as well with regards to the engagement don't necessarily just look at what people are commenting on their posts i would check to see if that influencer is actually engaging back with the comments and make sure that they're actually engaged with their audience rather than loads of people commenting on their posts i feel like if that influencer isn't engaging and actually speaking to the audience himself then that would be something that i would consider if i was looking to work with an influencer i think bear in mind as well that there are still influences out there that are a part of engagement groups um so if you're seeing someone with i don't know between 10 to 20k followers and they're they're getting like a few like 100 000 likes but then they're getting like 500 comments that's usually like a very strange strange ratio to see like it's quite rare um so i would just be double checking really and yeah definitely off of what mac said they're checking that they're engaging back because if not it could just be that they're a part of an engagement group and they're not really the kind of hot leads that you would want for if you were collaborating with them like the people that would most likely buy um the product from them i love that um so we've got a couple of questions in the chat um so we've got a question here that says what is a great way to build coverage to post um and it's kind of similar to the second question so how did you get confidence to show up online um and then how do you consistently build coverage um i'll go ahead with this one i think for me and this is genuinely what really helped is i just thought how much do i care about sarah from college and and how much she posts and and do i really focus on the amount of likes or what she looks like or how many comments she gets i don't analyze that and i think we all get so caught up in it and thinking that people are like watching us 24 7 and waiting for us to kind of make a mistake but they're really not because people are so self-involved and so focused on them on themselves that they're really not bothered um whether something is perfect or you make a mistake or something i think it's it's an insecurity that a lot of us have kind of got within ourselves now for some reason um but really just don't give a crap um about people's opinions and you i think you'll find as soon as you start you'll notice that people don't really have opinions and when you do start to get people's opinions and you do start to get people leave comments that aren't so nice just remember that that's a sign of your success really and that's you doing well and it's certain people that are jealous that they're not getting that kind of reach that you are um but yeah don't don't wait about and think oh i don't have the right equipment to do this i don't have the right setup to do this like oh this isn't perfect i can't post it just just post something and the more you post them more you will naturally get better at it because you're constantly practicing and i think it's also important to be self aware and understand what your strengths are some people were just really not comfortable in front of a camera but they could be amazing writers they could be great photographers so i would say maybe start off with playing to your strengths so if you're a great photographer or blog writer you could really push the blog and the instagram side of things and then slowly build up the confidence on the video side of things obviously i do mainly cooking videos if i wanted i could literally not be in the videos like at all there's so many pages that have like millions of followers and it's literally just you always see as their hands and the food cooking it's like an overhead sort of shot um so there is that as well and i think over time you will build the confidence um once you start posting consistently and start seeing the results and the feedback and what you've got to understand is there is literally always going to be haters and trolls and stuff like that like all i do is try and help people yeah i still get so many people just commenting horrible things in my videos and it's just one of the things you've got to understand and it's almost like part of it and just try to ignore that and focus on the positive side of things um and don't get like too annoyed like they could literally just be having a bad day and they're not a horrible person they've just had a bad day they put a comment on your post they didn't mean anything by it what they said isn't true um so yeah i'll say focus on the positive side of things play to your strengths and be self-aware um we've got time for a bonus question um so it says as a startup digital agency how do you convince brands to work with you or your agency um i suppose i can tackle this from an agency perspective um i think the evidence in your work and telling stories they're two underrated things that people can just be doing all the time so if you haven't got work that's been paid for go create work so early on in the agency we literally found influencers that we wanted to work with and we started telling stories we found products and we made campaigns for ourselves and put a little bit of money behind it you know anyone can go and get 500 pound a thousand pounds of my belief you can do a couple of jobs you can sell some stuff and with that you can actually make something um a lot of times people just need to believe that you can kind of deliver and then part two is utilize the power of linkedin and instagram to document the process of what's happening behind the scenes um and reach out to other bigger agencies if you're not having luck with brands um as they sometimes have spillover work that they're rejecting that you can kind of tap into and actually one of our competitors go agency were one of the first clients who actually gave us work with goldsmith university so you'd be surprised um in that cycle you don't just have to pitch to brands you can actually work with you know bigger businesses so um yeah i hope that answers your question there 35 of you have anything else to chime in but that's been so useful when i've built different businesses um evidence in the work and building case studies asap has always worked yeah i think for me i've always been asked as well by by other girls that i know that are influencers like oh what's a good brand to collaborate with like what brands should i reach out to and i always say well what brands do you actually love like which brands do you actually buy from and genuinely are kind of like a fan of those are the types of brands you want to be collaborating with but typically if that's the case you will already have products that you've purchased from that brand right so essentially i think when you start out just genuinely show your passion for that brand and create that quality content and the type of content that you would create if it was a paid campaign and then when you do go to brands be like this is this is something that i've created for for this brand just because i genuinely love them and i would love the opportunity to do this with your brand or do this further with a paid paid collaboration that kind of thing love that um right guys we've had a lot a lot of information shared in the last hour um we are going to be releasing this as a playback video there's still a lot of questions here that i've been sent in that we'll try to tackle in a future session um as always with above the project um we like to tell people that you can kind of book a free coaching free mentoring and kind of get involved with the platform and the brand um we do have on our website membership section which is free where you can meet other entrepreneurs on the journey um we just ask you guys to fill out a survey and join onboarding call so please do that next week we're going to be announcing all of our events for october um we'd love to get feedback from you guys with what you guys want to see but um i think you guys can be excited with what we have um chloe and max um what are some interesting things happening with both of you before the end of the year um so quite a few different things at the moment um we just started off on like a six month partnership with skinny food co which i'm really looking forward to that my healthy lifestyle mobile app launches at the end of next month i've been working on it for almost a year so i'm really hold on celebrate that and um the same as well with the my hidden veg source brand as well we're going to be launching that really soon over the next few weeks um releasing another cookbook um what else and next week i'm doing a what would it be called i'm not sure but at the arnold sports festival which is one of the largest sports and uh fitness festivals in the world i got invited to um cook on the live kitchen there so that's something i've never done before i'm used to doing it in front of my my phone screen in my kitchen so doing that live in front of a lot of people will be um an interesting but hopefully fun experience come on well we'll be tuning into all of that um and well done max chloe yeah so next week we're actually launching a vegan and sustainable clothing line um for the business which is super exciting wait hold on and then um i've got a few more live talks that i'm going to be doing i've got to go to a couple of founders meals which is bizarre to me because i still see myself as being this 23 year old girl not like a founder which is a bit wild and but that's super exciting and we're also now in talks with india reynolds from love island because she's vegan and potentially collaborating on bringing out a product line with her so that's really cool so well guys you guys are big inspirations for many people you guys are literally pushing the curb and showing that you can be a business owner and influencer thank you for all the gems you guys have shared thank you everyone for attending the saturday session um be safe be happy enjoy your weekends and um yeah sign up to the personal project for more awesome events and more competitions have a great side eagle thanks for having us thank you see you later